


The Marauders

by Caverdash



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-09 01:12:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11658498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caverdash/pseuds/Caverdash
Summary: The Marauder's era beginning in their fifth year, with Remus Lupin re-imagined as my own character Morgana.





	The Marauders

It was by no means a beautiful face, Sirius thought. She wasn’t sweetly pretty, like Lily Evans, all soft and round and dewy eyed. Nor was she silky and sultry like Marlene Mackinnon, who was tall and lithe with a voice like honeyed sex. Her nose was too angular, Sirius noted, her cheekbones too sharp. Her mouth was a small and delicate cupid’s bow that might have looked nice on another face, but contrasted too much with the backdrop of her hard features to be attractive. A long thin scar ran from her left eye down the length of her jaw and marred her otherwise smooth complexion. She was too pale, and she looked unwell. Her eyes were lowered to the large book she held in her lap, and Sirius could see her eyelids flutter above the dark arc of her lashes as she read the pages. No, Sirius thought, it was not a beautiful face, but it was a striking one.  
“Don’t think staring at me like that will convince me to finish your potions essay for you.” Sirius started. He hadn’t realized that Morgana had noticed his inspection. He affected nonchalance and arched his eyebrow coyly.  
“Why, Moony, you wound me! I would never dream of asking you to finish my homework. Besides,” he said, casually twirling his wand between his fingers. “My essay is already completed.” Morgana looked up in surprise. Now that he had her attention, Sirius couldn’t help but resume his examination. It was her eyes, he thought, that made her face so interesting. Over bright yet somber, mischievous yet restrained, gentle and fragile, but underneath an unyielding hardness that sometimes surfaced with an intensity that frightened him.  
“You’re finished?” Sirius snapped back to the moment. It occurred to him that he was already late, and he had wasted at least half an hour staring at Morgana. What was wrong with him today, he wondered. He struggled to recover his usual casual bravado and overcompensated by jumping out of his chair with a little more gusto than was necessary.  
“I am!” He near shouted. “And now I must be off to the library!” Morgana looked at him as though he had gone mad.  
“The library? Why? What horrible scheme are you concocting now? Lately you and James and Peter are always secretly cloistered away in there. You’ve excluded me, so I can only assume that whatever it is, is beyond barmy and you’re sure I would disapprove?” Sirius laughed.  
“You aren’t excluded, Moony. I just figured you wanted the option of plausible deniability for when the fallout hits.” He winked. “But prefect or not you’re a Marauder at heart. Come with me.” Morgana snorted.  
“No, thank you.” She said dryly. Sirius smiled inwardly, but sighed exaggeratedly for effect as he headed for the portrait hole.  
“Suit yourself, Moony! I suppose you’ll know soon enough!” He couldn’t help but call back cryptically as the portrait swung shut behind him. Morgana sighed into the empty common room, and returned to her book.  
Sirius raced down the staircases, taking the steps two at a time and jumping the last four to avoid the trick stair. By the time he arrived in the library, his uniform was appropriately disheveled, and his cheeks had taken on a soft, pink tinge. A group of six year girls giggled at him, but he paid them no heed as he walked to the corner where James and Peter were whispering furtively from behind a towering stack of books, loosening his tie with one hand as he went.  
“Where have you been?” James said grumpily. He had taken off his glasses to rub his eyes and he glared up myopically as Sirius flopped down at the table.  
“So sorry, mate, but you know I had Moony duty.” Sirius guiltily busied himself with pulling a loose parchment towards him. “We couldn’t have her popping down here while we’re in the middle of this. You know she loves the library more than any sane person should. She’s positively barking, that one.”  
“And?” asked Peter. “Are we safe?”  
“Perfectly,” said Sirius. “She’s safely ensconced in a tedious tome the size and thickness of her head, so that‘s sure to keep her occupied for hours on end.”  
“Excellent”, said James. Sirius looked down at the parchment he had tugged towards him. On it there were drawn several realistic and accurate renderings of a rat, a dog, and a stag. He recognized Peter’s handiwork. The boy was gifted with a quill. Beneath each drawing, in Peter’s neat print were the steps to complicated spell work.  
“Ugh,” said Sirius, rolling his eyes. “James. Why? You’re still on this deer thing?”  
“It’s a stag, and it’s cool.” James sniffed.  
“You know wolves eat deer, don’t you?”  
Peter laughed. “It looks like Bambi’s dad.”  
“What are you on about?” asked Sirius.  
“Bambi. It’s this muggle moving picture that Evans showed me once about a baby deer.”  
“What?!” James straightened stiffly in his seat.  
“Bambi’s mother gets killed by a muggle and—“  
“No, no, not Baboo! I’m talking about Evans! Are you two friends now? Did she mention me?”  
“Um, not really. She tutors me in potions. I’d ask Moony but you know she’s awful at it—“  
“Good god, men!”Sirius interrupted, smacking the table with his palm exasperatedly. “This is serious! There’s no time to waste talking about baby deer and chesty red haired witches!” Or staring at Moony, his conscience niggled him. “The full moon is only a week away!”  
“Alright, alright! Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” said James in alarm. Sirius’s temper was often mercurial at best, but as the full moon loomed ever closer without any tangible results in their goals, he had been even more tetchy than usual. “I think we’ve mostly got it worked out anyway. Now it’s all just a matter of trial and error.”  
“Well hold on,” said Peter, blanching. “Mostly worked out is not completely worked out. There’s still the matter of perfecting the nonverbal wandless spell casting. Sirius has come closest to mastering it, but even so, none of us is even close to perfect.” Sirius worried his bottom lip with his teeth. His eye caught one of the six year girls’ and she giggled again and flipped her hair teasingly. He stared, as the girl flirted frivolously, and thought of Morgana, all angles and sharp edges, who rarely giggled and was never frivolous, and was seized with a frustrated recklessness.  
“We’ll try tonight. I’ll go first. Midnight at the shack.” He stood abruptly and stalked off before James or Peter could argue. As he passed the table with the girls he shot them a haughty, disdainful glare. It had the opposite effect than he had intended however, and he left the library to the accompaniment of their besotted laughter.  
Sirius stood in the dilapidated shack with his feet shoulder width apart and his arms hanging limply, his palms warm with sweat. His head was lowered against his chest and his eyes were closed, either in concentration, or in prayer. He wasn’t sure himself which. What little light that seeped into the shack cast his face in a yellow glow, making him appear sallow and sickly.  
“I’d like it on record I think this a horrible idea.” James said, sprawled across a seedy, threadbare couch. The frame had been broken in half long ago, and the middle sunk down so that James looked like he was being slowly absorbed into the maw of some awful paisley monster. There was a tense timbre to his voice that betrayed his casual posture.  
“Me too.” said Peter from the corner, his voice barely above a whisper.  
“Shut up.” Sirius shifted from foot to foot, shaking out his arms in an effort to ease some of his nervousness. Fundamentally, he knew he was being foolish. Magic of the scope that he and the other self styled “marauders” were attempting was not to be practiced and executed lightly. There were so many things that could go wrong and Sirius definitely did not relish the prospect of being expelled from Hogwarts, especially if he was also stuck as a weird human-dog-hybrid abomination. But prudence had never been one of his virtues and the memory of the aftermath of last month’s full moon was still as fresh and painful as the new scar on Morgana’s face. Anything, he thought, anything to keep something like that from happening again. Sirius let out a gust of air. “H’okay. Here I go.” He resumed his original pose, head down, eyes closed, and concentrated on the image of a big black dog that lived down the street from his house at Grimmauld Place. His lips formed the words to the spells soundlessly.  
“You look like you’re trying to have a shit.” said Peter plaintively, after a long period of strained silence. James burst out laughing and the charged tension in the room eased.  
“Well I can’t very well do it with the two of you staring at me like I’m fucking Merlin risen!” Sirius grunted.  
“Face it, mate, we’re just not there yet. “ said James, placating. “No amount of clenching your arsehole is going to transform you into a dog. There’s a reason there’s only 5 animagus in the world. We’re just not going to make it by this moon.” Bitterly, Sirius kicked out at a leg on the sad couch. It crunched and cracked under the force and the couch leaned pathetically to the left. “Listen,” James’ voice held uncharacteristic levity, despite his flailing limbs, as he tried to extricate himself from the sinkhole in the middle of the couch. “I get that you’re worried about Moony. We all are. But in your quest for magical mayhem, you’ve only succeeded in ruining the aesthetic of my favorite couch.”  
Sirius opened his mouth to retaliate. He was worried, yes, but that was only part of it. He was possessed of a sense of urgency that seemed to be frustratingly unfelt by his fellow Marauders. It wasn’t that Morgana had awoken the morning after last moon, arm broken, hollow eyed and looking like the victim of a muggle knife fight. It wasn’t too a far departure from the usual full moon recuperation and Sirius rather thought that the scar only added mystique to an already mysterious face. It was that she had looked, well…resigned. Not angry, or upset, or even surprised, to have the terrain of her face so drastically altered, but just…expectantly defeated. It wasn’t fair, not for a girl of fifteen, and especially not for a girl like Morgana. Of all his best friends, at worst, James was an arrogant twat, Peter could only be described as a blob, and he himself more often than not a moody pretentious prick, but Morgana? She was something entirely other, and Sirius found himself, not worried, but angry.  
“Yeah, Sirius. Let’s just go back, I’m freezing me bollocks off.” Sirius swallowed his retort and swung his foot again at the cracked couch leg, barely flinching when the bottom half broke off and flew across the room to hit the wall with a dull thud.  
There was something definitely odd. The boys were keeping some secret from her, Morgana was sure. Something huge, and probably potentially catastrophic, judging by the way they shiftily dodged her questions. It was unusual for them to keep something from her for so long and she felt that it could only bode ill that they had managed to keep whatever they were concocting under lock and key for upwards of a month now. Under normal circumstances, Peter would be the easiest to crack. He was so sweet, and by nature hardly duplicitous. But the fifth year O.W.L.S had everyone on edge and Peter was so preoccupied with his studies that Morgana doubted that even he knew what was going on with the other Marauder boys. She glanced over the edge of her parchment at the next table, where James and Sirius had their heads close together, locked in some secret collusion. The petty part of her flared with jealously.  
Morgana didn’t begrudge James and Sirius their friendship. From their very first day of Hogwarts, they had been in lock step. It was her own lack of a counterpart that pricked the jealous recesses of her heart. She would never have a best friend, not the way that the boys did. Most days it didn’t bother her; just another consequence on a very long list written by the nature of her condition, to be alone. And while the girls in her dormitory were nice enough, Lily Evans, in particular, Morgana had always managed to keep them a safe and successful arm’s length away. It was only Sirius’s inexhaustible and exasperating inability to stay out of other people’s business that had led to her inclusion to the Marauders in the first place. Still, it was hard not to feel left out sometimes.  
“What do you think they’re up to?” Morgana asked suspiciously. She glanced sideways at Peter, who was gripping his hair with both hands.  
“They traded 3 goblin made swords for 640 gold bars.” He muttered.  
“They’re trading goblin wares for gold?!” Morgana asked, shocked in spite of herself. She knew that the Marauders were resourceful and worryingly lacking a moral compass, but she felt that this was extreme even for them. “Where did they even get goblin made weaponry?”  
“What?” said Peter, his eyes wide. “Is that wrong? Did Mendlewist and his men not trade goblin wares to get funds to begin his court in 1448?” Morgana snorted at her own paranoia. Of course Peter was talking about their history of magic notes. As usual, he was grossly misinformed, and Morgana was slightly irked at him for distracting her from her detective work. Detachedly, she wondered at her own uncharacteristic disinterest in studying before turning back to resume her spying.  
“…unacceptable. We couldn’t go straight back to the castle, we’d be starkers and our clothes would still be back there --” She heard Sirius whisper and Morgana relaxed slightly. If whatever the Marauders were planning involved shedding their clothing, it certainly couldn’t be too sinister. Still, she was itching with curiosity. From their years of friendship, she knew that given the choice between the two, James would be the easier to dissect. Unlike Sirius, he possessed an inherently unguarded character, and his natural geniality had led him to unwittingly divulge a myriad of confidences to Morgana in the past. With this in mind, she packed her things at the bell and turned away from the Great Hall, fighting upstream against the onslaught of students to corner James just outside the common room.  
“Are you ever going to tell me what you guys having been planning?” She asked by way of greeting, pinning James against the wall so that he nearly tripped over a suit of armor.  
“Oh hey Moony! I suppose that depends.” He pushed his glasses up his nose with one hand before steepling his fingers together philosophically. “Am I talking to Moony, my traitorous former comrade who has forsaken her loyal and courageous friends for her shiny new prefect badge? Or am I talking to the lovely, brilliant Moony, legendary Marauder and foremost architect of the great pudding prank of ’77?”  
“You’re talking to me, the girl who’s going to whack you upside the head if you don’t answer me. Also, I wish you guys would stop calling me Moony. It’s a little too on the nose, don’t you think?”  
“Relax.” He waved a dismissive hand. “No one will ever figure out your furry little problem.”  
“The three of you imbeciles figured it out!” She retorted, exasperated. James shrugged.  
“Yeah well, we’re bloody brilliant, aren’t we? Listen, Moony, love to stay and chat, but quidditch practice, you know.” And before she could protest he was bounding off down the hall. Morgana sighed.  
She spotted Sirius at the far end of the Great Hall, surrounded by several open books and knocking his forehead against the surface of the Gryffindor dining table. He was hardly the only one; the Great Hall was littered with panicked fifth years, cramming in study sessions even as they ate. Michelle Shanville was sitting at the Hufflepuff table rocking back and forth and muttering spells under her breath and the whole of the Ravenclaw table sat in complete and morbid silence, each with a book next to their plates. But Morgana was not fooled. She was all too aware that Sirius was blessed with the uncanny ability to pass his lessons in spite of infrequent studying and inattentive listening. She very much doubted the O.W.L.S study fervor that was presently gripping the school was infecting him too. Morgana was certain that whatever had Sirius so frustrated had absolutely nothing to do with his schoolwork and everything to do with his secret prank.  
“Nooo.” Sirius groaned as Morgana sat next to him. He hadn’t raised his head from the table and his voice was muffled against the table cloth. “I don’t want to take you to Hogsmeade next weekend. I don’t need help with my lessons, and I’d rather be castrated then go to another Slughorn dinner. Please.”  
“Well, that’s good,” she said mildly, helping herself to some mashed potatoes. “I don’t want to do any of those things with you either.” Sirius raised his head.  
“Oh. I thought you were Holly Waithin again. That girl will not let well enough alone.”  
“Really? I seem to remember you saying you admired her persistence.” Sirius groaned again.  
“I can’t be held accountable for what past Sirius says. That guy’s a tosser, can’t be trusted.” Morgana turned the book closest to her so she could read the cover. It was Standard Book of Magic Grade 5. She blinked in surprise and grabbed the next book. It was Transfiguration: O.W.L.s Edition. Was Sirius actually studying? That couldn’t be right. Come to think of it, though, she thought, glancing sideways at him. He did look a bit peaked, maybe he wasn’t feeling alright.  
“You look a bit peaked, are you feeling alright?”  
“I’m fine. Why?”  
“Well, it’s just that, I think you’re actually studying?” Sirius hmphed into his pumpkin juice with feigned indignation.  
“And here I thought you’d be proud, Moony.”  
“For finally doing something the rest of us have been doing for the last five years? Not likely. And when exactly are you three going to finally fess up and tell me what the next great heist is? I’m starting to feel neglected.” She began flipping through Standard Book to make certain there were no secret plans hidden within the pages.  
“Aww, Moony, the moon always makes you so paranoid. There’s no conspiracy afoot. And I could never neglect you. Oy, hold on—” Sirius reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his wand. He brandished it with a flourish and across the hall pumpkin juice spilled down the front of Severus Snape’s robes. Morgana shook her head.  
“Really?”  
“What?” Sirius’s eyes glinted mischievously.  
“Again? With the cursing Snape? I think it’s you who can’t leave well enough alone.”  
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m completely innocent. Past Sirius strikes again, that handsome devil! Besides, it was purely educational. It seems I have finally mastered nonverbal spell casting.” Morgana didn’t bother to respond and began ladling herself some soup. Sirius gathered his things and pushed back from the table. “Well I’m off. You shouldn’t worry so much about these alleged secret plans. There aren’t any. And, even if there were, you’d never figure them out anyway.” He flashed her his most winningest smile and left the Great Hall.  
For the fourth time that week, Sirius stood shivering in the Shrieking Shack, willing the spell that would turn him into an animagus to work. After their first failure of an attempt, James and Peter had noisily refused to accompany him until they had perfected the spell work, but Sirius was determined to keep trying regardless. He glanced at his watch and sighed dejectedly. For the fourth time that week, he had spent the entire night in the shack and still had nothing to show for his efforts. The full moon was tomorrow night and a growing sense of powerlessness was clouding his concentration. He had to restrain himself from blasting James’ favorite couch into oblivion. He knew Morgana would likely need it when she woke the morning after her transformation.  
The thought of Morgana only succeeded in depressing him further still. He glared around in the tenebrous darkness, at the peeling wallpaper and the debris strewn floor, and lamented that she was cursed to return here month after month. If only they too could transform into animals so that they could keep her company on those awful nights. How easy then, he thought, would it be to remind her that she was Morgana Lupin, a girl with friends who loved and supported her, and not some slavering monster. She had been served a cosmic injustice and it hurt him to see her wear her burden like she deserved no better. When Peter had first offhandedly mentioned animagus, the idea had taken root in Sirius’s mind with something akin to obsession. It had seemed a simple solution to a complicated problem. If they didn’t want Morgana to suffer her transformations alone, they would transform themselves. In their naïve arrogance, Sirius had truly believed their genius was unbounded and they would be frolicking with Moony by this moonrise. But now, standing disheartened and alone in the oppressive dark, fingers numb with cold, Sirius accepted defeat.


End file.
